What is Critical Appraisal

What is critical appraisal?

Critical appraisal is an essential part of evidence based practice and involves systematically evaluating evidence to establish whether it is valid, accurate and relevant. It is important to critically evaluate evidence to ensure its quality and clinical relevance for your proposed use. Critical appraisal can also save you time by allowing you to focus on the research that is important to you.

How do you critically appraise an article?

There are some useful tools, checklists and further reading suggestions listed below, which will guide you through the critical appraisal process.

As well as being available in print in several editions across the Library Network it is also available to browse online or download to a mobile device as an ebook. The original BMJ articles from 1997 on which the book chapters are based are also available, see for example:

Statistics

Getting to grips with statistical information is often an area of critical appraisal that people feel daunted by. General introductory books on critical appraisal will cover the basics, see the reading list below for suggestions, but here are some further resources which focus on this specific topic: